Thursday, November 24, 2011

So I decided I needed something to celebrate the completion of #nanowrimo, and with Christmas coming up, I thought this was a nice opportunity for another give-away.

That's right. FREE for Christmas - a sale right up to and including Christmas day. This is so that when you get the kindle or nook under the tree from Santa, you will be able to grab a novel to put straight on it.

Well, November is drawing to a close and so is #nanowrimo for another year. And this was a good one. I started with an odd premise and an opening death scene, some basic ideas about current society, and came up with a somewhat lurid cover. I wrote notes and plans. I researched vampires a little and the 18th century a lot, more ancient myth even more. I created a world, a parallel earth that was somewhat unlike our own.... All in October, of course.

Then it was a matter of hitting the ground running for November, which worked very well, and the 50,000 words were typed by the 8th. That was easier than I thought, but by that stage the main supporting character, and perhaps the best in the entire novel which was essentially based around her, had not long appeared on the stage. Sure, she had met the main character, picked her up as a very wet hitch-hiker, taken her to New York... Only to walk in on an armed robbery and have this unknown woman take a bullet for her. And it goes downhill from there to the line:

“What would make me most comfortable would be to not have a vampire in my apartment.”

It was clear there was more novel to come. Another 43k in fact, which took until the 14th to complete, with a little epilogue work on the 15th. This has meant that there was plenty of time to do a quick first edit to make the story more consistent - there are always new ideas as you go and you might as well do those while they are fresh. It's a time for filling in the blanks. This is what they call a frangle in this universe. Silvia really did have three pairs of spare underwear. It also means that the release time-line looks a lot better than last year's rebel nano which took until March for the first draft and is still not finished editing.

Hopefully this means Vampire Planet will see an early release in 2012 as one of the more unusual alien invasion stories of the hour. I will leave with the last line of the novel...